Beginning in early 2001 we had a Salon Premium programme that involved gating off a very small amount of content on the site – maybe one or two pieces a day, out of a dozen or more original articles – and removing the ads for paying subscribers. This programme was moderately successful in keeping some cash coming in the door for our company, which had seen advertising income plummet after the dotcom bust began kicking in in mid-late 2000.

Immediately after 9/11, the advertising revenue that was already low went, essentially, to zero. Advertisers simply didn't want their ads next to coverage of 9/11 and related events, but that was what our readers wanted and our editors wanted to give them. So we made a risky decision to gate off all our news content at the start of October. Arts, tech, business coverage and other soft features were still available to all. You can read David Talbot's letter to readers explaining the move here.

It "worked" for us in that it provided some revenue for Salon to survive through the leanest period of its existence. (We'd already completed the latest of three rounds of layoffs, and the entire staff took pay cuts, three weeks before 9/11.) But within a few months, as advertisers began dipping their toes back in the water and the influx of new subscribers who'd flocked to help us out in a crisis dwindled, we could see that the subscription model didn't provide much room for growth. So we tried something new: we put up an ad over the front door of the site. Subscribers wouldn't see it at all; other readers had to watch a 30-second video ad, then they got a "day pass."

The day pass approach was beloved by the advertisers and hated by many, though not all, readers. More important, by this point the public was, understandably, thoroughly confused about how to get to read Salon content. It took many years for our traffic to begin to grow again. Paywalls are psychological as much as navigational, and it's a lot easier to put them up than to take them down. Once web users get it in their head that your site is "closed" to them, if you ever change your mind and want them to come back, it's extremely difficult to get that word out.

Salon was and is exclusively online; magazines and papers have revenue from print or other offline products. So they often find themselves in a position of balancing tradeoffs: if we do X online, we gain Y online revenue but we lose, or think we might lose, Z in offline revenue. Salon didn't have those calculations – but then neither did we have the cushion of income from a declining but still substantial old-fashioned media business model.

I start with the assumption that internet-based media will gradually come to dominate news distribution and consumption over the next, say, quarter-century. TV and print won't vanish but they will steadily lose readers, influence and revenue. They ought to be using their "legacy" revenue to fund the expansion of their online presence and experiments; instead, they seem today to be eager to squeeze their online operations for revenue to subsidize the old newsroom. It's the same kind of short-term thinking that has already allowed so many newcomers and interlopers to seize their readers and advertisers.

As for the question of how "niche" you need to be for a paywall to work – I think it's pretty simple economics: if you have a product that is scarce, you can charge for it more easily. Specialised information, information that people need to earn their livings and can't get elsewhere, and so on. If there are free alternatives, you are not going to get very far, even with an edge in quality.

You can also make it work if you have a relatively low cost structure and a very loyal set of readers who have some commitment to your product as a cause. Salon Premium, at its peak, brought in about $2m (£1.2m) annually, which really was quite an achievement. We had the loyal reader base but our costs were way too high.

I'm not hostile to the notion of people paying for online content. I do so myself. I'm glad people stepped up and paid for Salon. But the value of stuff online is usually tied to how deeply it is woven into the network. So locking your stuff away in order to charge for it means that you are usually making it less valuable at the moment that you are asking people to pay for it. And that's why people so often respond with: "No thanks."